Last updated 3/28/24
In gratitude I receive shelter and sustenance from the sun, land, air and waters of the Florida Everglades, even though I am a lifelong uninvited guest. I honor and respect the protection and reciprocal care exchanged between the Everglades and their always and forever rightful guardians: the Miccosukee and Seminole people, and before them the Tequesta people, and before them the Glades people, and others Indigenous to this place.
I acknowledge and grieve for the violent harm and trauma that European colonizers and settlers have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate upon the land and the land’s rightful guardians, first through wars of conquest, dispossession and genocide, and continuing through relentless extraction, profit-motivated agriculture, urbanization, and displacement.
I witness and am personally caught up in the patterns of settler culture, which has established a global extractive economy that harms the well-being and threatens the existence of all life on Earth, and locally escalates capitalist practices causing the spread of city structures that are directly destroying living beings while rapidly shrinking safe habitat for all wild species.
As a non-Indigenous third-generation resident of Fort Lauderdale, a city that arose from a non-legitimate settlement imposed by the violence of war, and which was later settled by my own ancestors and family with roots in Europe, I realize that my enculturated mindset doesn’t spontaneously provide for healthy interbeing with the land, waters, other humans (Indigenous or otherwise), the spiritual universe, and all the wild species where I live.
Yet I feel the urgent need to transform (or evolve beyond) the social systems that are causing great harm to the living world while threatening the possible annihilation of all life on Earth. So I feel compelled to examine the harmful patterns I’ve been born into, with the intent of breaking them down, and to help transform and heal relationships among the living (to the extent possible in my lifetime), at both the individual and collective level, at both a local and global scale. As the historical contradictions of modernity/capitalism/imperialism (it goes by various names) intensify into multiple crises, we go deeper into an unsettling time of transition, part of an endless process of collective emerging, co-evolution, and mutual becoming. As it always does, the shape of the future depends on how we metabolize the past, respond in the present, and imagine potentialities.
To begin to imagine and participate in social transitions away from the currently globally dominant extractive and exploitative economy, and toward collective life-affirming transformation and healing, I’m coming to understand the need to let go of indoctrinated assumptions, and find paths outside of familiar boundaries and conditioning. As in political/economic life, so in art. Learning is unfolding through listening to Indigenous voices and publicly shared teachings, nurturing personal relationships with plant, wildlife, and human neighbors, tying together threads of community around shared values and intentions, and surrendering to stillness for the guidance of the universal spirit to be heard through intuition and to flow through creative practice.